1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to telecommunications systems, and more particularly, to automating and aggregating access to customer service, entertainment, and social networking systems.
2. Related Art
Organizations with large constituencies often use customer service automation systems such as web sites with self-service elements and interactive voice response systems as a means to reduce costs and reduce the need for live operators to handle customer inquiries. The same is true of social networking sites, which rely heavily on automated email responders and other self-service mechanisms to avoid direct, live interaction with users.
It is typical for larger organizations to receive thousands of customer inquiries each day. These may come in the form of emails, web site visits, interactive voice response (IVR) dialogs or even face-to-face interaction in a retail scenario. It is typical for these larger organizations to spend millions of dollars each year on the development and maintenance of systems used to handle such customer interaction. For live interactions, enterprises employ automatic call distributors (ACDs) or private branch exchanges (PBXs) and various computer-telephony integration (CTI) techniques.
The popularity of the Internet ushered in many new ways of dealing with customers in an automated fashion, including speech recognition systems, SMS auto-response functionality, and automated email reminders. The uptake of these types of technologies has been aggressive. Whole divisions of certain large organizations are now dedicated to finding new and innovative ways to automate customer service oriented transactions. This partly due to live, agent assisted transactions having high costs, which can be as much as 15 to 20 dollars per transaction in overhead. Cast against the relatively low cost of 10 cents for an Internet-based automated transaction, companies scramble to cut costs with these automated systems. One of the contributing factors to the high costs is the 800 or toll-free number carriage. Companies have not adapted to the newer Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) capabilities because it is difficult to link these capabilities to an 800 number. Furthermore, customers do not have an incentive to use a VoIP-based phone when the number they are calling is free to them. Nonetheless, a means to eliminate 800 number charges so companies can take advantage of VoIP-like technology has remained elusive.
The wholesale adoption of self-service automation has created customer backlash. With the advent of the Internet and its ubiquity and easy access to competing vendors, customers have become more fickle and apt to switch alliances with favored vendors at a moment's notice. Increasingly, loyalty and “high touch,” or more personalized customer service, has become a competitive distinction amongst some companies. For example, Southwest Airlines has sworn off automation in their call center, thereby eliminating the use of IVR systems so that customers always get a live agent. Customer service industry analysts and researchers have been counseling companies with high transaction volumes to be careful about not “over-automating.”
Many attempts over the years have been made to ‘soften’ self-service forms of customer service (such as IVR) or make it easier to use. For example, the Analog Display Services Interface (ADSI) standard was internationally adopted after it was issued by BellCore in December of 1992. In essence, ADSI allows for “Visual IVR” by transmission of data mapped to voice-based IVR into remote screen prompts for phones with soft key capability. The conventional analog for circa 1992 screen-based phones is the Smart Phone.
Before the BellCore ADSI “Visual IVR” specification was finalized, its use was promoted by sharing the information with various third parties. For example, Dialogic put algorithms on its boards to communicate via ADSI to enable Visual IVR on phones from Nortel and others. Other popular IVR-oriented suppliers quickly developed ADSI-Visual IVR systems. In addition to Dialogic, others such as Intervoice, VoiceTek, Fanstel, and Nortel followed suit.
Other customer service systems besides Visual IVR are known in the art, and companies such as Venturian Software, NetCall Technologies, Securicor Telecoms and Lansys have demonstrated Web-based callback and ACD callback systems dating back to 1995. One noteworthy system is the CyberCall product from Venturian, which was a major collaboration between these well-known telecommunications companies at the time. CyberCall allowed any ACD to be hooked up to both web sites and CTI servers so consumers could ask for an automated call back to their regular phone line. Such Web-based callback systems, however, did not see widespread deployment because it could only be activated from a website, and could only be installed with substantial systems integration behind the enterprise firewall. There were many interdependencies to consider since enterprises oftentimes deployed a wide variety of disparate systems. In addition to difficulties associated with management, the static nature of the user interface, such as there being no customized menu choices, ACD systems have only seen nominal adoption.
Customers often find automated systems to be useful, especially if the business cannot respond to a customer service inquiry immediately because it was initiated after business hours. Many IVR systems, for example, are accessible 24 hours a day and able to dispense valuable information to users at any time. Likewise, web sites are typically not bound by regular business hours.
From the user's perspective, however, there are two fundamental problems associated with automated systems. Most systems are poorly designed and can be very frustrating for the user to navigate. Indeed, some customers are so loathe to use automated systems for this reason, that they will instantly “opt out” of an automated system and demand live service. Of course, the wholesale adoption of this practice is costly for companies that employ automation systems. Additionally, users must traverse a veritable jungle of disparate, varyingly complex automation systems. There is no single, unifying experience for the customer. Each automated system is different, with its own, unique interface, rules, protocols and foibles. The modality of most approaches is singular, that is, interfaces for the user do not transcend modalities such as web, phone, smart phone, IPTV, and so forth.
These issues cause a great deal of frustration on the side of the user community, or customers. On one hand, companies have a need to differentiate from competitors, but nonetheless have a compelling need to automate customer service in the interest of lowering costs. On the other hand, customers have become disillusioned about automation, and the ease with which a live service agent can be reached is a significant retention factor. Therefore, customer loyalty remains ever elusive.
Accordingly, it is desirable to achieve a balance between good, personalized customer service, and collecting a high volume of information through automation in order to save significant costs for each transaction.